Grant helps Atlanta Ballet choreographer and new mom bring a dance to life
Three months after her first child was born in June 2024, choreographer Claudia Schreier had to figure out how to care for a fussy newborn while creating a challenging new ballet nearly 900 miles from home, in Atlanta. It wasn’t easy.
Schreier, 39, is Atlanta Ballet’s choreographer-in-residence but lives with her husband in New York. She couldn’t leave their baby with a caregiver because Hana wouldn’t take the bottle and needed to be nursed every couple of hours. Besides, Schreier couldn’t imagine being away from her. Faced with a no-win choice between her family and her Atlanta Ballet responsibilities, she made a decision. “Either I come down to Atlanta with my family,” she told the company, “or I don’t come at all.”
Schreier is an important member of Atlanta Ballet’s artistic staff, but she’s not a full-time employee and therefore not eligible for benefits. There was no system in place that could give her and her family the help they needed.
Ballet donors are encouraged to support lavish new productions, not child care. But Chicago philanthropist Elizabeth B. Yntema was eager to address a clear need.
“Most performing arts philanthropy, ballet especially, is being done the same way it was 40 or 50 years ago,” she says. “It’s static, deadly dull. Nobody feels empowered to try something different.”
But she did — in coordination with Tom West, Atlanta Ballet’s executive director.
West knew Yntema as president and founder of the Illinois-based Dance Data Project, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting gender equity in the dance industry, specifically ballet, but he had never thought of her as a prospective individual donor.
“When I shared the news that Claudia was expecting, Liza told me how hard it is for a female choreographer who is starting a family to continue to travel and create work,” he says. “She asked if we’d consider extra support.”
Together they crafted a unique two-year, $14,000 grant that has made it possible for Schreier to bring Hana and family caregivers to Atlanta multiple times while creating “Rite of Spring” in 2025 and her newest work, “You Dig,” which premieres April 3-5 as part of the Ballet’s mixed repertory “Golden Hour” program.
$7,000 a year seems like a small amount compared with the millions required to produce new ballets like “Coco Chanel” or “The Nutcracker,” but it was a big boost for Schreier. “The delirium of coming back (to Atlanta) to work postpartum on a project like ‘Rite of Spring’ was intense — a wild ride physically and emotionally,” she says.
One of the work’s themes, humanity’s battle against nature, was deeply personal for her as a new mother. “What kind of planet is my daughter going to inherit?” she wondered as she was creating the ballet. Being able to enjoy dinner at the end of the day with her husband, Adam, and Hana eased some of that psychological strain.
The grant “made a colossal difference,” Schreier says. It helped pay for a bigger apartment in Atlanta, a larger SUV rental, various items of baby equipment and airline tickets for family caregivers. Adam was always with her. Sometimes her mother or mother-in-law flew in to babysit as well.
She also needed a private space at the Atlanta Ballet studios where she could nurse Hana every couple of hours, and where her family could babysit while she was working. West came to the rescue again. His team created a maternity room close to the rehearsal studio.
Each ballet takes Schreier months to create, from deciding on the theme in collaboration with artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin, choosing the music, developing a movement vocabulary, working with costume, scenic and lighting designers, casting, teaching and rehearsing dancers. Some of that can be done long distance, but in-person time with the dancers is crucial.
For “You Dig,” Schreier spent three weeks at the Atlanta Ballet studios last fall and is in town for two weeks this month, including opening night. Adam and Hana came with her every trip.
“You Dig” is a short piece set to music by three Black composers: Julius Eastman, Nkeiru Okoye and Errollyn Wallen. Like most of Schreier’s ballets, it has no overt narrative. However, some of the deep emotions she experienced while creating “Rite of Spring” clearly lingered.
“It’s about the relentless fracturing of someone’s internal and external experience, about the inability to think clearly when everything seems upside down,” she says. “It’s intentionally a very disorienting work, but with a sense of lightheartedness even in the midst of chaos.”
Schreier’s second three-year contract with Atlanta Ballet and the grant from Yntema both end at the close of the 2025-26 season.
Because of the challenges of working as an independent choreographer and starting a family, some women leave the field at least temporarily. But Schreier is at the peak of her career and intends to keep creating. She has choreographed, directed and produced for dance, opera and film in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to her seven ballets for Atlanta Ballet, she has created works for Boston Ballet, Miami City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and many other ensembles.
Hana turns 2 in June. When she outgrew a piece of baby equipment recently, Yntema learned that another member of the company had inherited it for their baby.
“I almost burst into tears,” Yntema says. “This grant has a trickle through effect. That is exactly what I wanted. It’s one of the best things I have ever done.”
West shares the feeling that this first-time grant has constituted an important step for women in ballet.
“I wish there were more philanthropists like Liza who recognize artists as human beings with cycles of life,” he says. “They need to be supported so we don’t lose these years of a choreographer’s creative life.”
If you go
Atlanta Ballet: “Golden Hour”
April 3-5. $40-$175. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. 800-982-2787, atlantaballet.com.
